D.A.’s Sympathy Born of His Experience With Unjust World

When James E. Rogan, a deputy district attorney in Pasadena, was prosecuting Harles Hamilton for murder earlier this summer, Rogan approached the defendant’s mother during a break in the trial.

He told Orine Gitchuway that he was praying for her and said he was sorry about her son’s difficulties.

Gitchuway acknowledged Rogan’s kindness, but the conversation went no further. Later, a Pasadena Superior Court judge dismissed murder charges against Hamilton after the jury deadlocked, as had three previous juries in the drawn-out case.

What Rogan didn’t tell Hamilton’s mother was that his sympathy stemmed from experience. Twice, his own mother has been convicted and jailed on felony charges of fraud.

‘Grace of God’

“I’m certainly not ashamed of it,” says Rogan, 30. In fact, he adds, he makes it a practice to approach relatives of those he prosecutes to “share with them that I know what it is like to sit in court and see someone you love be prosecuted.

“As a district attorney, I run into people who are in trouble and basically come from my background,” he says. “It really is a case of ‘there but for the grace of God go I.’ ”

Nothing in Rogan’s straight-arrow, pinstriped-suit-and-wing-tips appearance indicates his background as a dirt-poor welfare kid with street smarts.

“If I had to pick a modern-day success story (among) the people I know, I’d pick Jim,” said Laura Birkmeyer, a UCLA Law School classmate of Rogan’s, now an assistant U.S. attorney in San Diego. “He really has enjoyed a transformation.

“The great thing about Jim’s background,” she said, “is that, if he needs to, he can get into somebody’s face. He knows when he has to be tough and when he is being fed a line.”

When Rogan spent a year prosecuting gang members, Birkmeyer said, he sometimes intercepted and returned hand signals that gang members were sending to one another.

Occasionally, Rogan says, when he is arguing a case before a jury, he will “start thinking about where I came from. . . . To this day, it still strikes me as incredible.”

He was born in 1957 in San Francisco. His mother was a cocktail waitress, his father a bartender. The couple did not marry, and Jim was placed in the home of his maternal grandparents (his grandfather was a longshoreman), who raised him in a flat in the city’s Mission District.

By the time he was 9, both grandparents had died, and he moved in with a great-aunt. Three years later she died. Then Jim moved back with his mother, who had married and had three other children.

His stepfather was an alcoholic. After he blew a hole in the ceiling with a gun, Jim’s mother left, taking only the four children and the $128 in her purse.

‘Welfare Kids’

“I remember being 13 years old and paying for food with food stamps and having older people in line behind me pointing at us, calling us welfare kids. Most of the guys I grew up with, things didn’t turn out to be a very happy story for them,” says Rogan, who was never arrested himself.

One friend was convicted of murder and others became drug dealers.

“Jim was always the one we went to after we got into trouble. He would tell us what to do to get out of trouble,” says a childhood friend, Frank Ambrose, who describes himself as a professional gambler.

“We never had no fathers, so we took care of each other,” Ambrose said.

As a teen-ager, Rogan lived in Pinole, on the east side of San Francisco Bay. He dropped out of high school in the 10th grade. “I was a bright kid, and high school bored me,” he says.

The oldest child, he went to work to help support his family.

“We went through a lot of turmoil,” his mother, Alice Rogan, says today. “He was like a little father to the other kids.”

On his 18th birthday, he enrolled in Chabot Junior College. Two years later, he transferred to UC Berkeley.

While Rogan was in college, his mother was arrested for welfare fraud. She went to jail for three weeks. Four years later, she was imprisoned again, for six months, after being convicted on felony fraud charges resulting from her illegal use of credit cards.

Rogan recalls going to court with his mother and visiting her in jail. “It’s kind of hard to be ashamed now of a woman who was willing to go to jail so I could have Christmas presents under the tree, food on the table and clothes on my back,” he says. “She was prosecuted and took her punishment, rightfully so.”

Mother’s Feelings

Now manager of a party supply store near San Francisco, Alice Rogan says: “Jim went through a hell of a lot as a kid. That’s why I think he’s a good D.A. I used to laugh and say to Jim: ‘I’d never want to go before you as a D.A. You’d send me to jail and throw away the key.’ ”

In 1979 Rogan entered UCLA Law School, working to support himself as a bouncer at an adult movie theater, a pizza maker and a stacker in a tire factory.

At one point, he spent his days at law school and his nights as a bartender at two North Hollywood clubs, the Palomino and Filthy McNasty’s. Once he broke up what he thought was a fist fight between two men in McNasty’s parking lot, only to discover that one of the men was stabbing the other.

As the man with the knife came toward him, Rogan pulled a .38-caliber revolver from an ankle holster and fired into the air. That stopped the fight, but the man who had been knifed died from his wounds.

‘Can’t Send Me Back’

“There’s nothing that anybody can do to me to scare me,” Rogan says. “You can’t send me back to where I came from. I came from the bottom.”

Partly because he worked constantly to support himself, Rogan nearly flunked out in his first year of law school, scoring the lowest grade in his criminal law class. Later he received financial help from student loans, and by his final year he had made the prestigious law review.

“The guy is a riot,” Birkmeyer said. She recalled how he unsuccessfully tried to mix his middle-class student friends with unusual companions. Once, a friend of Rogan’s brought a handgun to a party. On another occasion, Rogan appeared escorting a Playboy model. Rogan still drives the 1971 Chevrolet Impala he had in law school.

Upon graduation, he was hired by one of the state’s biggest law firms, Lillick McHose & Charles of Los Angeles. But he says he “found that big law firms pay you to be miserable.”

‘Pushed Me Over’

The turning point came when, representing a shipping company, Rogan won a case involving a longshoreman who had been disfigured in an accident. He approached the plaintiff, who reminded him of his longshoreman grandfather, and tried to apologize. “I told him: ‘I’m really sorry, sir. I was just doing my job.’ He looked right past me. That really pushed me over the side.”

Taking nearly a 50% cut in pay, Rogan left behind his rosewood-paneled office and the prospects of prosperity from a civil practice in maritime law. In 1985, he joined the Los Angeles County district attorney’s office, where he says the windowless cubicle he shares with another attorney is painted “gas chamber green.”

“Now,” he says, “when I convict a child molester, when I convict a gang murderer, when I convict a rapist, I never have to walk up to him and say I’m sorry. I never have to apologize as a prosecutor. If they’re not guilty, I won’t go after them.”

Although Rogan can be disdainful and stubborn and seem like a smart aleck, Birkmeyer says, he sticks by his friends no matter what the circumstances or their station in life.

‘Emotional Victims’

Rogan reaches out to defendants’ families as well as to crime victims and their families. “I try to give them a little emotional support because, in a way, the loved ones are victims . . . emotional victims,” he says.

“I let them know that nobody is blaming them for what their son or daughter did. I’ve seen that look in parents’ eyes. . . . They’ve got that fear. . . . They are scared for their child, scared for being in the courtroom.

“I’ve had grown men start crying and telling me . . . how hard they tried to raise their son or their grandson.”

Sometimes, though, he says, “I get a defense attorney sniveling. He’ll say, ‘You don’t understand. . . . (The defendants) didn’t have a father. . . . They had to steal. . . . Well, that really doesn’t wash with me.”

Prison Warehouses

Rogan acknowledges that prisons merely serve as warehouses that “never changed a person’s life except to make them madder and meaner.” But he says society has to protect itself from criminals.

“I thank my mother for every failure she ever had,” Rogan says, “because it was through her failure that I was able to learn and maybe do a little bit better.”

Some people, he says, might be ashamed to talk of a life like his. “I’m not, because there are so many kids . . . that have dropped out of high school . . . and don’t think there is any hope. It might sound corny, but my message is: You can do anything you want to do in this country, anything, if you’ve got your education. Just go up to the trough and eat.”

Active in politics since he was a teen-ager, Rogan describes himself as a conservative Democrat. He is a member of both the state and the Los Angeles County Democratic committees. One day, he says, he may run for public office.

No matter what happens to him, he says, “when you are born into this kind of life, it’s in your gut. I’ve never forgotten where I’ve come from and never will.”